Having taken a few days off―168 to be precise―your scribe has now returned to the writer’s desk to once more enter the fray.
No, I was not sidelined with a case of COVID. Nor did some momentous life experience throw a high hard one to the side of my head and put me on my backside. Family has been fine and health excellent (if you don’t count the shoulder that wants replacement after hitting about 950,000 overheads on the tennis court over the course of too many decades―simple arithmetic).
Being serious though, I’ve thought hard about why I fell victim to a 168-day writing famine, a real writer’s block, and I think it comes down to three things:
1. There is so much bloviation in the internet’s ether that one’s goal should be to subtract from it, rather than add to it. Technology now allows anyone and everyone to label themselves “expert” and throw their intergalactically significant thoughts up against the literary wall to see if any stick. Perhaps 5% are worthy of the effort, and that’s being generous. Ask yourselves how many pundit “opinions” land in your inbox every day. If you’re like me, it’s a lot. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be exhausting.
2. The “new normal” is not. It’s abnormal. For me, it’s like walking into an art museum and finding all the paintings just a little crooked. It’s woozy inducing. Like trying to plant cut flowers, to quote Daniel Boorstin, the late American historian and Librarian of Congress. And calling it the new “normal” is misleading, because “normal” suggests this is what life will be for all of us forever: The Norm. One hopes that, like every other plague in history, humanity will one day emerge into the bright sunshine of maskless and vaccinated good health, with COVID no longer the grim reaper. But that day is somewhere in the fog of the future.
3. The bitter, atavistic, and in many cases downright ignorant partisan wars erupting every day all over the media, social and otherwise, have changed the American landscape. They put in sharp relief the good and the bad of democracy’s fabric. The constant search for “gotcha” moments, the in-your-face bellicosity, the biblical attachment to lies regardless of truth no matter how well-proven, bring out the very worst in all too many people with cruelty as sharp as the edge of an ax. Vlad the Impaler could learn a thing or two from some of these folks who have all the intellectual honesty of a lap dance and whose minds are about as deep as a pool table’s side pocket.
For the last 168 days I’ve been the fly on the wall of the human condition. I’ve watched people as artificial and superficial as a casino lobby jockey for power and influence. While more than 800,000 Americans have died from COVID, self-interest has reigned and hobbled the best efforts of heroically dedicated people devoted to improving the lot of the rest of humanity, the rest of us. This has caused a kind of intellectual paralysis, like being thrown into a deep pit and finding it rough to climb out. Have you felt that way, too?
Three years ago this month. I told the story of how Frederick Banting’s team of himself, Charles Best and James Collip recovered and purified insulin from the fetal pancreases of cows and pigs in 1922, how they successfully tested it on humans, how Banting won the Nobel Prize the following year for his discovery, how the team sold the patent for the discovery to the University of Toronto for $3.00―a buck apiece―and how they and the University agreed to license the manufacturing rights to pharmaceutical companies royalty-free, because, in Banting’s words, “Insulin is my gift to mankind.” The team and the university wanted to incentivize drug companies to improve on the Banting team’s discovery, so the University and Banting agreed to allow the companies to improve Banting’s formulation if they could and patent any new discoveries that arose. Their hope was that drug companies would share their vision of making it possible for Type-1 Diabetics to live high-quality lives and to keep insulin prices low to help them do it.
That was 100 years ago. Today, the Build Back Better bill, the one West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin killed yesterday, would have, among other things, let Medicare negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies for a very limited number of high-cost drugs and would have capped the monthly cost of insulin for many, but by no means all, diabetics at $35. That may still happen, but its odds of passing just went from perhaps to probably not. One wonders what Frederick Banting would think of all this.
At any rate, vacation’s over, and my tiny voice will do what it can to throw light into the dark that shrouds us all.
Tags: health policy, healthcare
